And so the wheel turns
Rosemary Neill’s article in today’s Australian, Analysing their Dark Materials, revives an old argument: bleakness in YA (and children’s) literature. Suddenly it’s the ’90s again – many will remember the Marsden, Hartnett and Margaret Clark debate that raged hotly a decade ago.
A few online references take us back to that time. A bibliography from Flinders University (scroll down to ‘Bleak Fiction and the Need for Hope’) and an unsigned, but still worthwhile, three-parter here are both worth a look.
Neill’s piece is in the context of Requiem for a Beast. How amazing that people can be so disturbed by words and images on a page that they resort to hate mail!
Other titles referenced in The Australian article are Story of a Girl (Zarr), Boy Toy (Lyga), Marty’s Shadow (Heffernan), Then (Gleitzman), The Island (Greder) and the Gossip Girls series.
Agnes Nieuwenhuizen (Right Book, Right Time), Mark Macleod, publisher and a past president of CBCA and Bronwen Bennett, the current CBCA President have their say, with Bennett reminding us that Grimm’s fairytales are indeed grim.
September 28th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
[...] Julia has a letter published in today’s Review section of The Australian in response to last week’s article on YA literature. Unfortunately, these letters, unlike those in the main section of the [...]
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